CONCLUDED Opinion: ASUU, FG stalemate – It’s like the pretender fighting the deceiver

Two, while ASUU agrees to be disengaged from the encumbrances of a unified civil service wage structure, it goes on to demand that whenever there is a general increase in public sector salaries and allowances, the remuneration of academic staff shall be correspondingly increased. Simply put, ASUU wants to have the best of both worlds.

Three, in the agreement, ASUU ensures that the renegotiation team agrees to its salary demands but as soon as discussion shifts to other matters, the team only recommends. And so, on matters involving the Education Tax Fund, Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), amendment of the National Universities Commission Act (2004), and funding of universities, which are major institutional channels for reforming education, what ASUU does is to recommend, agree to recommend or project.

Finally, ASUU has been going about its latest industrial action like a social crusader when the crux of it all is increased wage. On its website, President Faggae wrote: Dear Comrades, as the struggle to save Nigerian University system is being pursued, I’ll like to salute all our members for their resoluteness in ensuring that the 2009 ASUU/Government Agreement is implemented in accordance with the Roadmap defined by the 2012 MoU. We believe very strongly that the rot and decay in the University System is not only arrestable but also reversible. We believe even more strongly that, the key to turning round the University System lies in the sincere implementation of the Agreement… We will continue to carry the banner of this struggle to its logical conclusion….

By sanctimoniously claiming to be fighting to reverse the rot in education when it is in fact chiefly motivated by its own pecuniary benefits, ASUU is equally guilty of the deception and mischief its president oft-accuses the government of. Between Jonathan’s Federal Government and ASUU, I cannot find the saint; and I find them jointly culpable for the current standstill in the country’s tertiary education.

My prediction is that the ongoing industrial action will be hard to halt. Whatever his understandable grouse with the 2009 agreement or the negotiators on behalf of the government, President Goodluck Jonathan fulfil its dictates. That is the moral thing to do. An agreement was signed; it must be honoured until such a time when it is due for another review. And surely, ASUU or no ASUU, a government in which a federal lawmaker willing to play ball receives N4m as soon as a breakaway faction surfaces at the National Assembly has the financial resource to embark on an infrastructural overhaul of education.

But with Jonathan suggesting on 29th September that the academic union has been hijacked by the opposition, this strike will not be over anytime soon. In case you haven’t seen a Nollywood movie in a while, well, “this is just the beginning!”